A Message from SCD Director
Al Kellie

I
n Fiscal Year 2004, SCD defined its strategic plan for the next
five years and met significant computer security challenges while
continuing to provide integrated support services for researchers
in the atmospheric, oceanic, and related sciences.

Two major accomplishments stand out for this year: bluesky's
contribution to research for the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) and meeting cybersecurity challenges.

Climate Modeling for IPCC

Phase III of the current Advanced Research Computing System
(ARCS) was placed in service in FY2004, increasing net computing
capacity by two teraflops. Phase III of ARCS expanded the IBM
Cluster 1600 system (bluesky) by fourteen 32-way p690 Symmetric
Multi-Processor (SMP) servers. Bluesky is now comprised of 50
POWER4 38 Regatta-H Turbo frames, making it the single largest
system of this type in the world.

Twelve of these new servers were initially dedicated to
NCAR's participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). This new supercomputing capability proved
essential in completing the IPCC simulations with the
high-resolution version of the new Community Climate
Simulation Model (CCSM3). Long control simulations, numerous
historical recreations, and a wide range of future scenarios
were carried out with NCAR's flagship coupled climate model
at much finer horizontal resolutions than has ever been
possible before.

The graph shows average global temperature change scenarios
that were computed during the IPCC runs on bluesky. The amber line
(20thC freeze) shows the temperature trend associated with no
change in current worldwide emissions of anthropogenic aerosols.
The other three lines show model predictions for other aerosol
emission scenarios.

Strong support by SCD staff allowed the CCSM group to run
continuously throughout the experiment period, even during determined
hacker attacks. The results of this experiment are now being analyzed
by NCAR scientists, and the data are being distributed freely to the
global climate change research community in time for the Fourth IPCC
Assessment Report.

Bluesky contributed over 25 centuries of simulated climate to
the IPCC effort -- more than half of all IPCC computing during
this campaign. At the conclusion of the IPCC campaign in late
FY2004, the 14 new p690 nodes were released to the community to
augment SCD's computing capacity for all users. The current
aggregate peak capacity of NCAR's supercomputing facility is
now 12.1 teraflops distributed across six SMP computers.

Computing Security and Divisional Threat Response

In response to a major cybersecurity incident that involved
multiple high-performance computing sites in March 2004, SCD
rapidly developed and deployed a long-term solution for
protecting the supercomputing and mass storage systems at
NCAR. SCD now requires one-time password tokens, arbitrated
via encryption devices issued to all users, to access these
systems. Security procedures were updated and published
to provide all users with guidelines and instructions for
working within the secure supercomputing environment.

One of the problems encountered during the March 2004
incidents was a lack of effective communication among the
affected institutions. SCD proposed a conference to bring
together stakeholders from the nation's research and
high-performance computing centers to prepare a
coordinated response for future incidents.

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF),
SCD planned, organized, and hosted a two-day Cybersecurity
Summit near Washington D.C. Attended by over 120 cybersecurity
experts from some of the nation's leading research institutions,
the summit explored the competing needs of having an open,
collaborative research environment while protecting the
security and integrity of its computing and data assets.

The map shows the locations of the sites participating in
the Cybersecurity Summit. This broad-based collaboration aims
to coordinate strong response plans for threats against research
computing and data.

Cybersecurity Summit 2004 was the first step in laying the
foundation for responding to future large-scale security breaches
and reducing the disruptive impact of such incidents on the nation's
research agenda. These research institutions are increasing their
cooperation on security policies, procedures, and incident response
to better protect the nation's scientific computing and data
resources.

Other areas of significant advancement in FY2004

The Mesa Lab standby generators were commissioned and put
into service. These twin generators provide an eight-hour
window of emergency power to the NCAR Computer Room as well
as the Mesa Lab's life-safety systems in case of electrical
outages.

SCD entered the era of Linux cluster computing with the
acquisition in FY2004 of a 256-processor e1350 AMD Opteron
cluster from IBM. With a peak of 1.1 teraflops, this system
outperforms bluesky on a processor-for-processor basis by
roughly 40%.

In the area of experimental computer technology, SCD, in
collaboration with the University of Colorado, won a $1.2M
2004 MRI grant from the CISE directorate in NSF. This money
will be used to acquire a 1024-processor, 5.6-teraflops Blue
Gene/L MPP system in FY2005. This system will be used to
study the suitability of a variety of scientific applications
and algorithms to Blue Gene/L.

SCD released new versions of the MySCD portal that provides,
for the first time, customizable GAU charging information
directly to our users.

Our Earth System Grid web portal was released in the summer
of 2004. Designed for general use by the climate modeling
community, it has already played a significant role in the
IPCC activities of CCSM by allowing easy access to the latest
CCSM data. Users may browse the data catalogs hierarchically,
perform searches on metadata, download full files, or subset
the virtual aggregated datasets.

Our Network Engineering and Telecommunication Section (NETS)
built the local-area networking infrastructure in UCAR's new
Center Green Campus, bringing that campus into full compliance
with UCAR networking infrastructure standards.

SCD's staff has accomplished many more activities this
fiscal year. As you read through this Annual Scientific Report,
you will gain a greater appreciation of the level of
innovation and support that SCD is committed to provide to
NCAR, UCAR, and the greater atmospheric sciences research
community. Behind these annual accomplishments is a level of
infrastructure support that is literally without peer anywhere
in the country. NCAR, as a national discipline-specific center,
benefits enormously from the dedication and talented work of
SCD's staff who work behind the scenes to ensure a
state-of-the-art, balanced, end-to-end computing environment.

As we look forward to implementing SCD's new strategic plan,
we reflect here on the accomplishments of this past fiscal
year. As always, we seek to provide the finest in computing,
research, data storage, networking, analysis, visualization
resources, and user support to help advance the scientific
understanding of our physical world.